Nov 14, 2013

1971: Live Album Reviews

GRATEFUL DEAD

I approached this album with mixed feelings; one side of me saying "Well, you love the Dead don't you?" and the other half repeating "They went commercial, and this ain't no different."
Well, I'm right on both counts, I think. Sure they do hummable c&w-type tunes now, but they mix in such fine rhythms and Garcia's talking guitar on this live album so it's hard not to like it.
Side one is very catchy, with ‘Bertha’ (known to some as ‘Had to Move’ from their bootlegs), Merle Haggard's ‘Mama Tried’ (pure spiff), ‘Big Railroad Blues’ (gosh, so great) and ‘Playing in the Band’ (Bob Weir can sing so well when he wants; he and Garcia are a perfect match).
Side two, an eighteen-minute version of ‘The Other One’ opens with a solo by Bill the Drummer that's too long (if he had Mickey Hart to jam with, then it might be something to groove-on-out-to; unfortunately, this is shades of ‘Toad’ boredom), and finally goes into ‘That's It For the Other One’ (if you remember Anthem of the Sun, the greatest Dead album ever). Well, after taking so long to get into it, it isn't all that astounding, mind-boggling, or whatever. Don't get me wrong, it ain't bad, but Mickey Hart – wherever you are – please return to the Dead 'cause they can't do the old stuff anymore.
Side three has its high points and low ones, and starts off with the latter, a pointless song entitled ‘Me & My Uncle’. ‘Big Boss Man’ is the only Pig Pen song on the entire album (a real shame; they could have at least whet our whistle with ‘Good Lovin'’ and/or ‘Smokestack Lightning’), which makes it a necessary track but unless Jerry & the boys start featuring McKernan more on albums, he better start recording with another band cuz his talent is too strong to discard. ‘Me & Bobby McGee’ is nice, but this kind of stuff is better suited for the New Riders. The Dead do a wonderful version of ‘The Weight’; why is it not here? ‘Johnny B. Goode’ is, by its very nature, one of the better tracks on the album and rocks like the Dead should do more often.
Side four is the one where you expect the big thing to happen, right? Well, it starts off with a quite unspectacular song ‘Wharf Rat’, which lasts for eight minutes and goes literally nowhere. But there is a saving cut on this album, a piece de resistance, as they say...
I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be –
You're gonna give your love to me.
I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna stay –
Where love is not love not fade away.
‘Not Fade Away’, with that Bo Diddley beat and fine harmonies, this is the cut on the album. The typical genius guitar solo of Mr. Garcia, wailing away into ‘Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad’. A very nice cut, and if it wasn't on the album [then] the Dead fans of old might just as well not buy this album. This is an album for followers of the new Dead, the Grateful Dead quartet that plays pretty songs and sometimes has a grungy-looking singer making guest appearances, but never plays like the two-drummer, two-guitar, keyboards Dead of the past.

(by Jon Tiven, from Phonograph Record, November 1971)

* * *

GRATEFUL DEAD

To avoid any possible disappointments for those who once had visions of saving the world through the music on Anthem of the Sun and any number of live performances, it might be nice to think of this album as an interlude for the Grateful Dead, a resting place where they’ve stopped over to brace themselves for the next series of atmospheric excursions.
Despite some heartening knew-they-could-do-it-all-along moments, it has all the earmarks of such a betwixt and between record – produced live, mostly other people’s songs, filtered through with a kind of relaxed air that relies on renditions of old familiars and any number of debt-paying tributes.
But if nothing else, Grateful Dead does make me a bit nostalgic for them golden days of yore, when not much of anything could be predicted from the group except that they would inevitably try through the course of each performance to take you some place you’d never been before. They would likely miss a good percentage of the time, and you’d perhaps spend a lot of time twiddling your thumbs while they’d try out and discard all combinations of musical paths, but the chances were good that they would leave you with enough massively memorable moments during the night to make the whole thing worthwhile.
The trouble is, however, that I don’t hear many of those memorable moments here. Except for some extended beauty that falls at the end of ‘The Other One’ on side two, what we get is another version of your local Dead bootleg that just happens to be recorded from the stage rather than vice-versa. This isn’t entirely bad – I’d much rather listen to the Dead light into ‘Johnny B. Goode’ than virtually anyone else – except when you happen to remember that the Dead used to be in the forefront of the rock avant-garde, using the basics of the earlier forms to flesh out the structures (or non-structures) of a music that might provide a stunning entrance into the cosmos of the third millennium A.D. Free jazz folks have been aware of this relatively untapped dimension for years (you know the usual names, I’m sure), but ever since the pyrotechnics of Live Dead, our boys seem to have backed away from such experimentation and confrontation, and the result is a mixture of pleasant good-time music and solid solos, brought up and made even more attractive by the Dead’s uniquely rich and majestic sound. It can’t quite be called bad, since it’s pretty clear that the Dead have progressed so far beyond your average garage band that there’s no danger of them ever slipping back, but it still can provide a bit of a letdown for those who have come to expect only great things from the grate.
‘Bertha’ opens the album, faded up at the beginning so that you are literally pulled into the "live" experience, and it’s a good way to start, with an irresistible rolling beat and a drive which might make Creedence sit up and take notice, superb Hunter lyrics and all. The rest of the side varies, with a nice Bob Weir rendition of ‘Mama Tried’, a sonofabitchin’ ‘Big Railroad Blues,’ and a Weir-Hunter composition called ‘Playing In The Band’ that is noteworthy for its great series of chord progressions and little else.
The programming, which up to now has taken a wait-and-see attitude, breaks down when you hit side two and are greeted by an extended Bill Kreutzmann drum solo. It pains me to say this about a drummer who blissfully shines throughout the rest of the album, playing what amounts to perfect supportive percussion despite any quick changes that are going down in the rest of the group, but given his solo group of minutes, he don’t cut it here at all. While his individual ideas are good, he never manages to give them internal coherence, any sort of organic connection, and the result is almost as if he had a list of tricks in front of him, and as he does each one he mentally crosses it off and jumps to the next.
But when Kreutzmann finally catches the beam at the end, the rest of the Dead are there to greet him with one of those supremely beautiful chord bursts that have given ample reason for their fans to become some of the truest fanatics in rock and roll, and from there until they stumble off the end of the side, there’s no holding them back. On a good night, the Dead can construct a masterful weave where everything seems to swirl around the next, and they’re at their finest here, spurred by the loving bite of Garcia’s guitar, Weir’s slap-dash rhythm, driven along by some of the finest bass playing on four planets, Mars and the asteroid belt included. Which only then makes the rest of the album so hard to explain. If they’re going to take you that high on side two, why do they give up the good fight and go back to "arranged" songs and cover versions for the remaining half of the record? With the exception of ‘Wharf Rat’ over on side four, of which I might say that it is assuredly one of the finest examples of Garcia-Hunter’s combined talents we’ve yet been privileged to see, there’s nothing here that doesn’t really amount to filler at an average Dead performance. The problem, of course, is that you don’t develop a ‘St. Stephen’ or a ‘Turn On Your Lovelight’ overnight; but why settle for second best? And if you argue that even second-best Dead is better than just about anything else on the market, I’d tend to agree. But again, why settle for second best?
Well, maybe they’ll clear that up for us on the next outing. In the meantime, think of this album as an interlude for the Grateful Dead, a resting place where they’ve stopped over to brace themselves for the next series of atmospheric excursions...

2 comments:

One thing to notice by 1971 is that reviewers can compare the new live Dead album not just to the actual shows, but to the bootlegs. Both these reviewers also have Anthem of the Sun ("the greatest Dead album ever") in their heads, and find that this album falls far short of what the Dead used to do in "the golden days." "Hummable c&w-type tunes" can't replace "a stunning entrance into the cosmos" - the first reviewer moans that "they can't do the old stuff anymore" without Hart & Constanten. And Kaye sighs that it's a letdown: "Our boys seem to have backed away from such experimentation and confrontation, and the result is a mixture of pleasant good-time music and solid solos... There’s nothing here that doesn’t really amount to filler at an average Dead performance."There is also a general disappointment with the selection for this album - why the drum solo? why just one long jam? why no more Pigpen? etc. - Tiven's Pigpen suggestions would have been good picks, actually, but he'd have to wait for the Bear's Choice album. (Tiven also says 'Bobby McGee' would be better for the New Riders, then asks, "The Dead do a wonderful version of ‘The Weight’; why is it not here?" Actually, the New Riders did 'The Weight'...) Kaye better recognizes the quality of 'Wharf Rat' than Tiven does; on the other hand, Kaye doesn't seem to notice 'Not Fade Away' at all, which is at least an album highlight. They both praise 'Johnny B Goode.' Kaye asks, "If they’re going to take you that high on side two, why do they give up...and go back to "arranged" songs and cover versions for the remaining half of the record?" He hopes that this album is just an "interlude" and the next one will go back to "atmospheric excursions" -- the next album would be the Europe '72 triple-album, which again focused more on short arranged songs than on improv. (Don't know what he thought of that album.)

On the other hand, this was the Dead's most popular album to that point; so what these long-term Dead fans regarded as second-rate Dead actually turned out to be quite "commercial" and brought in new fans.

Garcia told Rolling Stone in 1971: "It's the prototype Grateful Dead, [the] basic unit. Each one of those tracks is the total picture, a good example of what the Grateful Dead really is, musically... The new album is enough of an overview so people can see we're like a regular shoot-em-up saloon band. That's more what we are like. The tracks illustrate that nicely; they're hot... We've had better 'Johnny B Goode's, but that song for that year had been feeling good for us to play it... A lot of [the old stuff from the first album] we still do... That could've been this record, because we recorded everything we did and we didn't have a set show or anything. We didn't have a decent recording of it or we would've taken 'Cold Rain & Snow' or anything that was good, cause that's what we were after. We didn't care what song it was or whose it was or anything... "There's something on the new album [the Other One] that unfolds in the Dark Star tradition, so to speak. This new one is even more amazing. It is really some of the best playing that we've ever done, or that I've ever heard us do. If it were possible for us to survive playing music that was as potentially free and open as Dark Star, it's likely that we would do that... [But] you can only play so much high music in gyms, and then you're squeezing it out of yourself and it's not really happening."

Cameron Crowe wrote a brief review of this album for the San Diego Door (2/10/72) -

"The Grateful Dead are always changing. With every album they seem to have changed. Not by a large margin, but rather just enough so as not to stagnate in one particular musical field.The newest Dead effort, a double-live set, is a frozen portrait of the Grateful Dead’s music as performed in three separate gigs this past summer... That frozen piece of live Dead shows the group in top boogie shape...[Garcia's "regular shoot-em-up saloon band" album description quoted from Rolling Stone.]A shoot-em-up band indeed. Juxtapose this album with their earlier Live Dead and you have two different bands. Although the Grateful Dead have not really made any great leaps into a new brand of music, it seems that in the course of three albums, they have changed from a mind-blowing jamming band, to a rocking boogie band.The Dead are ever-improving as separate musicians, they have adopted a tight, well-rehearsed set, and seem to have abandoned the old format of playing an all-night long gig comprising of three or four songs. Side Two is the exception, however, with 'The Other One,' an eighteen minute improvisation that is an excellent sampler of the older Live Dead material. This actually makes it quite convenient for the listener. Sides one, three, and four for contemporary Dead. Side Two for contemporary Dead doing vintage Dead. It may sound strange in print, but to shorten the explanation, Grateful Dead is almost a mandatory purchase for the aficionado as well as those who know the Grateful Dead only as 'the-guys-that-did-Truckin’.'" http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/grateful-dead-garcia-review/